In a recent interview, AMD's next generation CPU architecture gets a name and a socket

Digitimes has a follow up to its interview with AMD's Henri Richard. We covered the first interview here yesterday. Digitimes tried to squeeze a few more details out of Richard about the upcoming K8L platform architecture. In the first interview, Richard would not comment on K8L.

That's not to say we're going to present K8L at Computex – don't get me wrong – but I think that that would be a good time to start to disclose more about the future because one of the strong attributes of our roadmap, both in 2006 and 2007, is socket compatibility. The nice thing we're going to do is to deliver to customers. Whatever improvements K8L will provide, they will be applicable to some of the sockets we will be introducing. Therefore, there's a certain logic, to my mind, in disclosing more at that time.

In the first interview, Richard referred to the new architecture as "8KL" instead, but Digitimes reporters did not get back to us about this idiosyncrasy. The three sockets AMD has on the roadmap are the 1207 pin LGA Socket F for servers, Socket AM2 for the desktop and Socket S1 for mobile devices. All three are expected to have working samples on June 6th, 2006 according to AMD's most recent roadmap.

In response to the approach AMD will take with K8L, Richard previously claimed that future AMD micro-architectures are strictly evolutionary and not revolutionary. In yesterday's interview, he also claimed that AMD will arrive at better performance by improving clock speeds and increasing cache sizes, but that future core technologies will have increased integer and floating-point performance. Seeing as K8L is the only technology on the AMD roadmap for the next year or so after AM2, we can only speculate as to what Richard means by that statement.

Update 03/15/2006: Chris Hall from Digitimes has confirmed with us that the "8KL" reference was a misquote and that Richard was really referring to K8L.

"There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere." -- Isaac Asimov